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BELL COUNTY MUSEUM TO HOST DOROTHEA LANGE'S AMERICA

Saturday, February 15

Join us for our new exhibit opening presenting a focused exhibition of original lifetime prints by the legendary documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Highlighting this show are oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression. The opening reception will be from 2-4 pm.

BELL COUNTY MUSEUM TO HOST DOROTHEA LANGE'S AMERICA

You force yourself to watch and wait. You accept all the discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is a very uncomfortable thing. You force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. I may be very hot. It may be painfully cold. It may be sandy and windy and you say, 'What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?'
--Dorothea Lange

Bell County Museum is pleased to present a focused exhibition of original lifetime prints by the legendary documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. Highlighting this show are oversized exhibition prints of her seminal portraits from the Great Depression, including White Angel Breadline, Migratory Farm Worker, and, most famously, Migrant Mother - an emblematic picture that came to personify pride and resilience in the face of abject poverty in 1930s America. The exhibit will be on view at the museum February 15 through May 3, 2014. An opening reception will be held on February 15 from 2-4 pm. The reception and exhibition are free and open to the public.

Lange herself had known adversity early in life. At age 7, she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifetime limp. And at age 12, her father disappeared from the scene, leaving an impoverished household behind. Every day she would ride the ferry with her mother from Hoboken to lower Manhattan, to a roiling working-class neighborhood teeming with immigrants. During that period Lange talked her way into photo courses with a range of teachers as diverse as Arnold Genthe and Clarence White. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco where she befriended the photographers Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, and, through them, the celebrated Western painter Maynard Dixon, who became her first husband. She soon opened a thriving portrait studio that catered to San Francisco's professional class and monied elite. But with the crash of 1929 she found her true calling, as a peripatetic chronicler of the many faces of America, old and young, urban and rural, native-born and immigrant, as they dealt with unprecedented hardship, sometimes with resilience, often with despondence. Her immortal portraits seared these faces of the Depression era into America's consciousness.

The Bell County Museum is open from noon until 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, please call 254.933.5243.